Tag: longevity

Why the Same Perfume Smells Different on Different People

The same perfume smells different on different people for three reasons, in descending order of evidence. Your own body odor mixes with it. Your nose is genetically different from other people’s, so the same molecules register differently. And you adapt to a scent you are wearing within minutes. Skin chemistry altering the fragrance itself is the weakest popular explanation.

Almost all writing on this subject asserts that skin pH transforms perfume. The research points somewhere more interesting and considerably better documented: a large share of the effect is not in the fragrance at all. It is in the perceiver.

How much of the difference is your nose rather than your skin?

More than most people expect, and this is the best-evidenced part of the entire topic. It is also the part almost never mentioned.

Humans carry roughly 400 working olfactory receptor genes, and they vary substantially between individuals. In a study that sequenced the olfactory receptor subgenome across 418 receptor genes in 332 people who had also been tested on smell perception, the median participant carried about 34 non-functional receptors. Variation in a single receptor gene was frequently associated with how an odor was perceived, and those associations attached more often to perceived intensity than to pleasantness. Keep the denominator in view: that was seven of the eight significant associations the study found, a small base to generalise from.

Four specific cases turn that general finding into something you can recognize in your own experience.

Androstenone: the same molecule as unpleasant, faint, or nothing

Keller and colleagues, publishing in Nature in 2007, tested 391 people on the steroid odorants androstenone and androstadienone. Variants of the receptor OR7D4 shifted detection thresholds elevenfold for androstenone and sixteenfold for androstadienone. Among people carrying one copy of the less sensitive variant, 46 percent could not detect the highest concentration tested at all, against 28 percent of those with two copies of the reference version.

The quality judgment moved with it. Carriers of the less sensitive variant “rated both steroids as less unpleasant,” and the proportion calling androstadienone extremely unpleasant was under half that of the reference group. The authors concluded that “OR7D4 genotype in our population explained 19% and 39% of the variance in the valence and intensity ratings of the steroid odours, respectively.”

One gene. Nineteen percent of the disagreement about whether something smells nice, and thirty-nine percent of the disagreement about how strong it is.

Beta-ionone: floral to some people, sour to others

This is the case that matters most to perfume, because beta-ionone is the violet and orris material used across an enormous number of fragrances. Jaeger, McRae and colleagues reported in Current Biology in 2013 that a single variant, rs6591536, encoding an N183D substitution in the second extracellular loop of the receptor OR5A1, is the causal variant for beta-ionone sensitivity and “explains >96% of the observed phenotypic variation, resembling a monogenic Mendelian trait.” On the perceptual side the paper’s own wording is that “sensitive individuals typically describe beta-ionone in foods and beverages as ‘fragrant’ and ‘floral,’ whereas less-sensitive individuals describe these stimuli differently.”

The primary paper is Jaeger SR, McRae JF, Bava CM et al., “A Mendelian Trait for Olfactory Sensitivity Affects Odor Experience and Food Selection,” Current Biology 23(16):1601–1605, and the two quotations above are from its abstract. The full text remains unreachable. Two figures that circulate widely in write-ups of this study have therefore been left out of this article: a roughly hundredfold sensitivity difference between genotypes, and a description of the insensitive percept as sour or vinegar-like. Neither appears in the abstract and neither could be traced to a primary measurement. An educational resource published by the Association for Chemoreception Sciences describes about half of people getting a strong floral quality from beta-ionone while the rest get a faint sweet note or cannot smell it at all; that proportion is reported rather than verified.

Musks: the material class you cannot escape

Musks appear in the base of a very large share of modern fragrances, which makes variation in musk perception unusually consequential.

Sato-Akuhara and colleagues, in Chemical Senses in 2023, examined the receptor OR5AN1 in 530 subjects. Participants homozygous for the L289F variant were more sensitive than those with the reference version. In their New York cohort, 12.83 percent were homozygous reference, 45.09 percent heterozygous and 38.68 percent homozygous for the variant. The more sensitive group rated ethylene brassylate, exaltolide and galaxolide as more intense, and in a separate Japanese cohort of 54 subjects the variant homozygotes had lower detection thresholds for muscone. Nitro musks such as musk ketone showed no such difference, so this is specific to particular musk structures rather than to musk as a category.

A separate study in PLOS Genetics in 2022, covering 1,000 participants in a discovery cohort and 364 in a validation cohort, identified OR4D6 as a musk receptor and found that homozygotes for its M263T variant ranked galaxolide intensity lower than reference homozygotes by an average of 33.3 percent and 17.1 percent across the two cohorts. The same paper reports that “almost 25% of the population has a specific anosmia” to 3M2H, one of the principal components of human body odor.

That last finding is worth pausing on. A quarter of people cannot smell one of the main molecules responsible for how human bodies smell. Some of the disagreement about whether a fragrance smells different on someone is disagreement about the background it is sitting on.

The crucial counterweight: not everything is genetic

The temptation at this point is to conclude that all odor perception is genetically determined. It is not, and the evidence against that is as good as the evidence for the cases above.

Knaapila and colleagues, in Chemical Senses in 2012, had twin pairs and their siblings rate the intensity of six odorants, with 1,573 participants. They established heritability for androstenone at h² = 0.30 and for galaxolide at h² = 0.34, “but not for the other odorants,” which were amyl acetate, eugenol, mercaptans and rose.

So genetics has a measurable grip on perception of some materials and no detectable grip on others. Rose smells like rose to more or less everybody. Musk and androstenone do not. Anyone who tells you that perfume perception is simply genetic is overgeneralizing from a handful of well-studied exceptions.

Odorant	Receptor	What differs	Documented figure
Androstenone	OR7D4	Threshold and pleasantness	11× threshold shift; genotype explained 19% of valence, 39% of intensity variance (n=391)
Androstadienone	OR7D4	Threshold and pleasantness	16× threshold shift (n=391)
Beta-ionone (violet, orris)	OR5A1	Sensitivity, and how people describe the smell	One variant (rs6591536) explains more than 96% of phenotypic variation in sensitivity; sensitive people describe it as fragrant and floral, less sensitive people describe it differently
Macrocyclic musks	OR5AN1	Perceived intensity, muscone threshold	12.83% of one cohort homozygous for the lower-sensitivity allele (n=530)
Galaxolide	OR4D6	Perceived intensity	33.3% and 17.1% lower intensity ranking in variant homozygotes
3M2H (body odor)	OR51B2	Detection	Almost 25% of the population has a specific anosmia
Rose, eugenol, amyl acetate, mercaptans	—	No heritable difference detected	No heritability established in a 1,573-participant twin study

What does skin actually do to a fragrance?

Skin does two things that are well supported and one thing that is mostly folklore.

It supplies a background odor that mixes in

This is the strongest skin-side effect and the most underrated. Body odor is produced largely by skin bacteria acting on secretions, and it varies with diet, health, hormones, washing and clothing.

Havlicek and Lenochova, in Chemical Senses in 2006, used a balanced within-subject design in which 17 male participants wore axillary pads through two separate two-week dietary periods, one including red meat and one without. Thirty female raters judged odor samples from the non-meat period as “more attractive, more pleasant, and less intense.” Diet demonstrably changes how a person smells, and perfume is worn on top of that rather than instead of it.

Combine this with the finding that a quarter of people cannot smell 3M2H and the picture gets sharper. Your fragrance is always a mixture with you, the mixture differs between people, and the audience is not even receiving your contribution consistently.

It changes the evaporation rate

A 2025 study in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, “Exploring the impact of fragrance molecular and skin properties on the evaporation profile of fragrances,” reports that evaporation profiles depend on both the molecular properties of the fragrance and the properties of the skin. Only its title and abstract were reachable, so nothing more specific is claimed from it here.

Sebum is the plausible mechanism. Sebaceous gland density reaches 400 to 900 glands per square centimeter on the scalp and forehead and is far lower on the limbs, and gland density measurably changes the lipid composition of the skin surface: palmitoleic acid and squalene rise progressively from forearm to chest to forehead. More surface lipid gives fragrance molecules more to dissolve into, which slows their escape into the air.

Sebum also varies between people and over a lifetime. A study of 713 subjects aged from six months to 94 years found forehead sebum significantly higher in males than females between ages 13 and 70, peaking around age 50 in men and 40 in women, and declining earlier in women.

Skin pH transforming the composition is the weak claim

Skin surface pH genuinely varies. The same 713-subject study found forehead pH higher in both sexes above age 70, with a positive correlation between pH and advancing age.

But the leap from “skin pH varies” to “skin pH chemically rewrites a perfume” is not supported by any work I could find. An alcoholic fragrance is applied and its solvent evaporates within minutes, which is a narrow window for surface pH to drive meaningful chemistry on materials that are mostly not pH-labile. The honest position is that this mechanism is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated, and that the well-evidenced explanations above are sufficient to account for what people notice.

Why does a perfume seem to fade on you but not on other people?

Because you adapt and they do not.

Prolonged or repeated exposure to an odorant “typically leads to stimulus-specific decreases in olfactory sensitivity,” operating at both peripheral receptors and central neural processing. Sensitivity “recovers over time in the absence of further exposure,” with the timeline depending on concentration and duration, and adaptation in olfaction “has been shown to be very long-lasting in some cases.”

Read the qualifier carefully: recovery requires the absence of further exposure. That never happens when the source is on your own wrist. You are in continuous exposure from the moment you spray until you wash.

This one mechanism accounts for a great deal of the “it disappears on me” complaint, and it explains the specific shape of the complaint too. People report that a fragrance vanishes after an hour while others still comment on it, which is exactly what adaptation predicts and exactly what a genuine loss of projection would not.

Which factors matter, and how much?

Factor	Strength of evidence	What it changes	Practical weight
Olfactory receptor genetics	Strong, for specific materials	How the same molecule is perceived, by you and by others	High for musks, ionones, steroids; undetected for rose and several others
Olfactory adaptation	Strong	How long you can smell your own fragrance	High
Background body odor	Strong	The mixture a nearby person actually receives	High
Diet	Strong, for body odor specifically	The background, not the fragrance	Moderate
Skin oiliness and sebum	Moderate	How fast the fragrance leaves the skin	Moderate
Skin temperature and ambient heat	Moderate, by physical principle	Early intensity up, duration down	Moderate
Hydration and moisturizer	Weak; plausible, little direct data	Possibly retention on dry skin	Low
Skin pH altering the composition	Weak; frequently asserted, not demonstrated	Unclear	Low
Medication and hormones	Weak for fragrance; body odor effects documented	Mostly via background odor	Low
Pheromones	None established	Nothing demonstrated	None

Which popular explanations do not hold up?

Do pulse points make perfume last longer?

The claim is that warm, blood-rich sites such as the wrists, neck and inner elbows make fragrance last longer. I could locate no published study comparing application sites for longevity, and the physical reasoning runs the opposite way from the promise.

Warmth raises vapor pressure, which increases how much material escapes into the air per minute. More escaping per minute means a more noticeable fragrance early and less left later. Applying to a warm site is a reasonable choice if you want to be noticed. It is not a longevity trick, and describing it as one gets the physics backwards.

Does rubbing your wrists destroy the fragrance?

The usual explanation, that friction crushes or breaks the molecules, is simply wrong. Molecules are not destroyed by rubbing two wrists together.

What rubbing plausibly does is spread the liquid over a larger area and warm it slightly, and both of those speed the evaporation of the most volatile materials. So the observed effect may well be real while the stated mechanism is nonsense. The effect is small either way, and since there is no benefit to rubbing there is no reason to do it.

Does skin pH change how a perfume smells?

Covered above, and worth restating because it is the single most repeated claim in this subject. Skin pH varies measurably between people and with age. No published work establishes that this variation restructures a fragrance. Treat it as an untested hypothesis that has been repeated until it sounds like a finding.

Do pheromone fragrances work?

Reviewing decades of work in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2015, Tristram Wyatt concluded plainly: “We do not yet know if humans have pheromones.” He noted that finding androstenone and related steroids in human sweat, and knowing they act as pheromones in pigs, “doesn’t necessarily prove they’re also human pheromones.”

No fragrance on the market can substantiate a pheromone effect on the available evidence. If a product’s core claim is pheromonal, the claim is ahead of the science.

Does diet change how your perfume smells?

This one is partly true, and the distinction matters. Diet has a documented effect on body odor, demonstrated in the red meat study above. It has no documented effect on the fragrance, which is a fixed formulation in a sealed bottle. Since what a person near you receives is the mixture of both, diet does change the result, by changing one of the two inputs. The popular version of the claim, that diet alters the perfume, is wrong in mechanism and roughly right in outcome.

Troubleshooting what you are actually experiencing

“It disappears on me within an hour.” Adaptation first, before anything else. Leave the room for twenty minutes and come back to your own sleeve, or ask someone. If others still smell it, nothing is wrong. If genuinely nobody can, the composition may be top-heavy, the dose may be too low, or dry skin may be releasing it faster; try a base-heavy fragrance and a moisturized application site before concluding your skin is unusual.

“People say I smell strongly of it and I cannot smell it at all.” The expected outcome of adaptation, and confirmation that projection is fine. The practical response is to reduce your dose rather than increase it, because your own perception is the least reliable gauge available to you.

“It smelled wonderful in the store and wrong at home.” Several causes stack. Store testers are sprayed on paper or on skin already carrying other fragrances; the shop air is saturated; and you tested the first ten minutes of a composition that takes hours to resolve. Retest on clean skin, judge at thirty minutes and two hours, and compare against a paper strip sprayed at the same time.

“It smells quite different on my friend than on me.” If the fragrance is violet, iris or orris-led, the beta-ionone receptor difference is a documented candidate: a single OR5A1 variant accounts for more than 96 percent of the variation in sensitivity to that material, and people on the two sides of it describe the same stimulus differently. If it is musk-led, the musk receptor findings apply. Neither is something you can change, and neither means your skin is at fault.

“Everyone else loves it and I find it faint and boring.” Consider that you may be the less sensitive party rather than the fragrance being weak. A quarter of people have a specific anosmia to a major body odor component, and receptor variants for musks are common, so being under-served by a particular material class is unremarkable.

How to test a fragrance on your own skin

Apply one fragrance at a time, to clean skin with no scented moisturizer, deodorant or hair product on the same area.
Use two or three sprays, which matches the roughly three-spray typical application found in consumer exposure surveys.
Smell at five minutes, thirty minutes and two hours. The opening tells you least about how you will actually wear it.
Leave the room for twenty minutes before each later check, so adaptation has a chance to reset.
Spray a paper strip at the same time and keep it. The difference between paper and skin at two hours is the part your body is contributing.
Ask one other person what they smell, at normal conversational distance rather than at your wrist.
Pay particular attention to iris, violet and orris compositions such as Dior Homme. These lean on beta-ionone, the material with the clearest documented receptor variant behind it, so reactions genuinely differ between people.
Retest on a different day. Ambient temperature, humidity, what you have eaten and your washing routine all vary.

The limits of what is known

The receptor genetics, the adaptation research and the diet study are directly measured and hold up well. Everything connecting skin properties specifically to perfume is thinner.

The 2025 evaporation study indicates that skin properties matter, but only its title and abstract were reachable, so this article does not claim which individual skin parameters drove the effect or that any particular measurement technique was used. The beta-ionone material is now quoted from the primary paper’s abstract; the full text was not reachable, so the sensitivity multiples that circulate in secondary write-ups have been dropped entirely, and the roughly half-the-population figure is attributed to a teaching resource rather than to a measurement. There is no controlled trial comparing application sites for longevity, no published quantification of how much sebum extends wear, and no demonstration that ordinary skin pH variation restructures a fragrance.

It is also worth being precise about what the genetics does and does not explain. The documented cases concern specific material classes: steroids, ionones, certain musks, certain body odor compounds. A twin study of 1,573 people found no heritability for rose, eugenol, amyl acetate or mercaptans. Receptor variation is a powerful explanation for particular disagreements, not a general theory of why perfume is subjective.

Anyone who quotes you a percentage for how much of the effect is “skin chemistry” is inventing it. What can be said with confidence is that the fragrance in the bottle is fixed, the person wearing it is not, and the person smelling it is not either.

If you are sensitive to this effect, test before committing to a large bottle. Woody and musky compositions such as Le Labo Santal 33 sit close to skin and interact visibly with background body odor, and they also sit in exactly the material class where receptor variation is documented. High-impact compositions such as 1 Million project largely on their own terms and vary less between wearers. Testing small is more affordable than it used to be, if less universal than you would hope: about 9.7% of what we list — around 382 bottles — comes in 30 ml (1 oz) or smaller, and about 5% in under 20 ml.

Common questions

Why does perfume smell different on me than on someone else?

Three effects stack. Your body odor mixes into the fragrance, and body odor varies with diet, hormones and skin bacteria. Your skin’s oiliness changes how fast the fragrance evaporates. And olfactory receptors differ genetically, so the same molecule can register as floral to one person and sour to another.

Does skin pH really change how perfume smells?

It is asserted far more often than it is shown. Skin surface pH does vary by site, age and sex, but no published work establishes that this variation chemically restructures a fragrance. An alcoholic perfume’s solvent evaporates within minutes, a narrow window for surface pH chemistry. Evaporation rate and background body odor are better-supported explanations.

Why can’t I smell my own perfume after a while?

Olfactory adaptation. Prolonged exposure produces stimulus-specific drops in sensitivity, and recovery only happens once exposure stops, which never occurs when the source is on your own skin. The fragrance is usually still projecting normally. Leave the room for twenty minutes and return, or simply ask someone.

Is it true that perfume lasts longer on oily skin?

Plausible and partly supported. A 2025 study reports that fragrance evaporation profiles depend on both the molecule and the skin’s own properties, and sebaceous gland density varies from 400 to 900 per square centimeter on the forehead down to far less on the limbs. No study has quantified how many extra hours this buys.

Do pulse points make perfume last longer?

No published study supports it, and the physics argues the other way. Warmth raises vapor pressure, so a warmer site releases more fragrance per minute. That increases early projection and shortens duration. Applying to warm skin is a reasonable choice for being noticed, not a way to make a fragrance last.

Does rubbing your wrists ruin perfume?

The usual explanation, that friction crushes the molecules, is wrong; molecules are not destroyed by rubbing. What rubbing actually does is spread the liquid over more surface and warm it, both of which speed evaporation of the lightest materials. The effect is small. There is no benefit, so there is no reason to rub.

Can genetics really change how a perfume smells to you?

For some materials, substantially. One study of 391 people found variants of the receptor OR7D4 explained 19 percent of variance in how pleasant a steroid odorant seemed and 39 percent of how intense. Violet-type ionones and several musks show similar receptor-linked differences. Other materials, including rose, show no detectable heritable difference.

Why do musky perfumes smell like nothing to me?

Musk perception is one of the clearest documented cases of receptor variation. Studies have linked OR5AN1 and OR4D6 variants to how intense specific musks seem, with one finding variant homozygotes ranking galaxolide intensity 33 percent lower. Roughly 12 percent of one 530-person cohort carried the lower-sensitivity genotype. It is common, and not a fault.

Does what I eat change how my perfume smells?

It changes your body odor, which the perfume mixes with, rather than changing the perfume. In a controlled study, 17 men wore pads through meat and non-meat diet periods, and 30 raters found the non-meat samples more pleasant and less intense. The fragrance itself is a fixed formulation and is unaffected.

Do pheromone perfumes work?

There is no established evidence for human pheromones. Reviewing decades of research in 2015, Tristram Wyatt concluded that we do not yet know whether humans have pheromones at all, and that finding such molecules in human sweat does not demonstrate they function as pheromones. Any pheromonal claim runs ahead of the science.

September 14, 2026

Sillage, Projection and Longevity: What the Three Words Mean

Longevity is how long a fragrance stays detectable. Projection is how far it carries from your skin at a given moment. Sillage is the trail it leaves behind you as you move. They are independent: a fragrance can last ten hours and project for one. Longevity comes from low-volatility materials, projection from volatile ones with low detection thresholds.

Those three words get used interchangeably in reviews, which is why reviews of the same bottle so often contradict each other. Separating them makes the contradictions disappear.

What do sillage, projection and longevity actually mean?

None of the three is a technical term. Inside the industry, perfume performance is described with a different vocabulary: impact is the immediate olfactory sensation, tenacity is persistence near the source over time, diffusion is how effective the fragrance is at some distance from the source, and volume is its effectiveness across both time and distance together.

Consumer vocabulary maps onto that imperfectly. Sillage is a French word for the wake a ship leaves in water, borrowed to describe the trail of scent a moving person leaves behind. Projection is a static measure — how far the scent reaches right now. Longevity is duration. The table below lines the two vocabularies up.

Consumer term	Closest technical term	What it measures	What drives it	How to observe it on yourself
Longevity	Tenacity	Duration for which the fragrance remains detectable at all	The proportion of low-volatility materials: musks, amber materials, woods, resins, and fixatives that slow the evaporation of everything above them	Sniff the sprayed spot directly at fixed intervals. This is the one of the three you can judge on yourself with some reliability
Projection	Diffusion	Distance from the skin at which the fragrance is detectable at a given moment	Materials that are both volatile enough to fill the surrounding air and detectable at very low concentrations	Ask someone at conversational distance. You cannot assess this on yourself
Sillage	Diffusion combined with air movement	The persistence of a scent trail in space after you have moved through it	The same materials as projection, plus how much you applied and how much you move	Ask someone who entered a room after you left it
“Beast mode”	Volume	High effectiveness across time and distance at once	A composition carrying both a strong diffusive fraction and a heavy low-volatility base	Both of the above, on separate days
“Skin scent”	High tenacity, low diffusion	Long duration, short reach	Low-volatility materials with unremarkable detection thresholds; many musk-led compositions behave this way	Long detectable at the wrist, undetectable at arm’s length

Why are they independent of each other?

Because the physical properties that produce each one pull in opposite directions.

The usable model is the odour value: for any single material, perceived intensity depends on its concentration in the air divided by its odour detection threshold. The air concentration in turn depends on how much of the material is present and on its vapour pressure. Written as a chain, intensity rises with the amount present, rises with volatility, and falls as the detection threshold rises.

Projection needs volatility. A material has to get into the air in quantity to be detected three feet away. High vapour pressure does that.

Longevity needs the opposite. A material that evaporates quickly is gone quickly. Persistence requires low vapour pressure — materials that release slowly over hours.

A material cannot be simultaneously very volatile and very persistent. So a fragrance that projects hard for an hour and then sits close to the skin for nine more is not malfunctioning. It is a composition with a diffusive top structure over a low-volatility base, behaving exactly as designed.

The third variable breaks the pattern further. Detection thresholds differ between materials by orders of magnitude, not percentages. Published compilations report vanillin detectable down to around 0.00000016 ppm at the low end of reported values, against ammonia from 0.043 ppm and benzene from 0.47 ppm. A material with an extremely low threshold can project strongly while present in trace quantities, and a material present in bulk can be almost imperceptible if its threshold is high. Weight in the bottle and loudness in the room are not the same measurement.

Behaviour you notice	Most likely cause	What it is not
Strong for an hour, then close to the skin all day	Diffusive volatile materials over a low-volatility base. Very common and usually intentional	Not a fake, a bad batch, or an application error
Quiet from the start but still there twelve hours later	A musk- or wood-led composition with few high-threshold diffusive materials	Not weak concentration. Concentration and diffusion are different variables
Loud for two hours and then nothing	A volatile-heavy composition with a light base. Common in citrus and aquatic styles	Not evaporation from the bottle or poor storage, unless the bottle is old
Others comment on it but you cannot smell it	Olfactory adaptation to your own fragrance	Not proof that it has faded
Behaves differently on you than on someone else	Skin properties and individual olfactory sensitivity, both of which vary between people	Not a different formulation in your bottle
Performs differently in summer and winter	Vapour pressure rises with temperature, so warm skin and warm air release material faster	Not a seasonal reformulation

Why do two people describe the same fragrance completely differently?

Three separate sources of variation stack on top of each other.

The wearer’s skin. A 2025 study in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, “Exploring the impact of fragrance molecular and skin properties on the evaporation profile of fragrances,” reports that both the intrinsic molecular properties of the fragrance and the properties of the skin shape how quickly materials leave, with the pattern differing between individuals. Only its title and abstract were reachable, so nothing more specific is claimed from it here. Fragrance does not perform identically on different people. That is the measurable part of why the same bottle behaves differently on other people.

The observer’s nose. Sensitivity is not uniform. A compilation of odour-threshold research reports work by Amoore in which 764 laboratory employees were screened for six types of specific anosmia — an inability to detect one particular odour while smelling normally otherwise — and found rates from 3 percent to 47 percent depending on the odour category, against a general anosmia to all odours of about 0.2 percent. The highest rate, 47 percent, was for the urinous steroid androstenone. The same compilation reports, citing Koelega and the National Geographic Smell Survey, that women are on average more sensitive to odours than men and that sensitivity declines past age 50. These figures reach this article through that compilation rather than from the primary papers, which could not be retrieved, so treat them as reported. The practical point does not depend on the exact numbers: someone who is specifically anosmic to a musk that forms the backbone of a fragrance will report it as having no longevity, accurately, from their own perspective.

The wearer’s own adaptation. Repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant produces a stimulus-specific decrease in sensitivity to it, recovering over time only once exposure stops, with the magnitude and time course depending on concentration and duration. The effect is not brief. In one study, subjects exposed continuously to an odorant in their homes for two weeks showed elevated detection thresholds and reduced perceived intensity, and for most of them reduced sensitivity was still evident up to two weeks after the last exposure. You are systematically the worst-placed person to judge your own projection and sillage.

How do you measure performance honestly?

Apply a fixed number of sprays and write it down. Two sprays and six sprays are different experiments. Keep it constant across fragrances you want to compare.
Apply to skin, not clothing, for a performance test. Fabric holds fragrance far longer than skin and will flatter longevity. Clothing is fine for wearing, useless for measuring.
Record the time of application. Estimates made afterward drift.
Check longevity by sniffing the sprayed spot directly at set intervals. Thirty minutes, two hours, four, six, eight, twelve. Note whether it is present, not whether it is strong.
Do not try to judge projection on yourself. Adaptation makes the reading meaningless. Ask a specific question of someone else: “Can you smell this from where you are sitting?”
Judge sillage by having someone enter a room after you. That is what sillage describes. There is no way to observe your own wake.
Leave the room for ten minutes and come back before making a final call. Recovery from adaptation is not instant, but a break helps, and longer breaks help more.
Repeat on a second day before concluding anything. Temperature, humidity, skin condition and your own sensitivity all shift. One wearing is an anecdote.

How do you describe what you want without jargon?

The enthusiast vocabulary is a barrier when you are trying to explain what you actually want. Plain descriptions work better, because they specify the behaviour rather than the label.

What you want	How to say it plainly	What to look for
High tenacity, low diffusion	“I want it to last all day but stay close to me”	Musk-, wood- and amber-led compositions. Often described as skin scents
High diffusion, any duration	“I want people to notice it when I walk in”	Compositions with a large diffusive fraction; frequently sweet, fruity or strongly aromatic styles
Low diffusion, short duration	“I want something for the office that will not bother anyone”	Citrus and light floral compositions, applied sparingly. Expect to reapply
Both high	“I want it to last all day and be noticeable”	Heavier compositions with both a diffusive structure and a substantial base. Usually best applied more sparingly than you expect
Predictability over strength	“I want to know what I am getting at hour six”	Simpler compositions with a clearly named base. Test over a full day before buying a large bottle

Which performance myths are wrong?

Myth: sillage and projection are the same thing

The claim: the two words are interchangeable.
What the evidence shows: they describe different measurements. Projection is reach at a moment; sillage is the trail persisting in space after you move through it. The industry’s own vocabulary separates diffusion at a distance from effectiveness over time and distance combined.
What people wrongly conclude: that two reviewers disagreeing about “sillage” are contradicting each other, when they may be describing two different properties accurately.

Myth: a higher concentration always projects further

The claim: EDP projects more than EDT by definition.
What the evidence shows: projection depends on how much diffusive, low-threshold material is in the air. Raising overall concentration raises everything proportionally, but it cannot add diffusive materials that are not in the composition. Brands also frequently reweight rather than simply dilute between concentrations. The concentration chart goes into what the label does and does not control.
What people wrongly conclude: that a quiet EDP is defective.

Myth: if you cannot smell it, it has worn off

The claim: the wearer’s perception tracks the fragrance’s presence.
What the evidence shows: adaptation is stimulus-specific and can be long-lasting. Continuous exposure over two weeks left detection thresholds elevated for up to two weeks afterward in most subjects in one study. Over a single day, you lose sensitivity to your own fragrance long before other people do.
What people wrongly conclude: that they should reapply. In a shared space, this is how overapplication happens.

Myth: performance is a fixed property of the bottle

The claim: a fragrance has a longevity figure, the way a battery has a capacity.
What the evidence shows: reported evaporation profiles vary between individuals, driven by both skin properties and molecular properties. Observer sensitivity also varies: one screening of 764 people found specific anosmia rates from 3 to 47 percent depending on odour category.
What people wrongly conclude: that a reviewer reporting twelve hours and a reviewer reporting three are reporting on different products.

Myth: rubbing your wrists together crushes the molecules

The claim: friction destroys aroma molecules and shortens wear.
What the evidence shows: friction between two wrists does not break chemical bonds. What rubbing actually does is warm the skin, which raises vapour pressure and speeds evaporation, and spread the liquid over a larger area, which increases the surface from which it evaporates. Both shorten the early phase.
What people wrongly conclude: that something exotic is happening. The effect is real; the explanation usually given for it is not.

Myth: more sprays produce proportionally more sillage

The claim: doubling the application doubles the reach.
What the evidence shows: gas-phase concentration scales with how much material is present, so more does mean more. But detection is a threshold phenomenon: once a material is comfortably above threshold for the people around you, further increases raise intensity without extending the useful range in proportion. Meanwhile the people nearest you receive all of the increase.
What people wrongly conclude: that a fragrance which does not project is solved by volume. It is usually solved by a different fragrance.

The honest limits of this article

There is no standard instrument, unit or protocol for consumer-level measurement of any of these three properties. Reported longevity figures, including any you produce yourself, are subjective judgements by a person whose sensitivity to that specific fragrance is declining throughout the measurement. The published research cited here establishes that adaptation occurs, that skin properties affect evaporation, and that olfactory sensitivity varies substantially between people; it does not establish how long any particular fragrance lasts on any particular person, and nothing can. The odour-value framework is a model used in perfume design, and like any model it simplifies. We have not tested, smelled or measured any product named or implied here, and no performance claim in this article should be read as a claim about a specific bottle. The most reliable information available to you is your own repeated wearing, cross-checked with someone else’s nose.

What to do with all of this when buying

Decide which of the three properties you actually care about, because optimising for one often costs you another. If you want all-day presence in a shared office, you want tenacity and low diffusion, and you should apply less than feels right. If you want to be noticed on arrival, you want diffusion, and you should accept that the loud phase may be short. Judge any bottle over a full day, on skin, with a fixed number of sprays, and get a second opinion before you conclude anything about projection. The full-day wear test is how you find out.

What our own catalogue shows

We cannot give you a ranked list of which fragrances we sell lean hardest on heavy base materials versus bright top materials, because nothing in a product listing records where in a composition a material sits. That is a real limitation, and it points straight at this article’s central claim: the information that would let you predict sillage from a label does not exist on the label. Base-heavy versus fresh is something you learn by wearing things, not by reading them.

Nor can we tell you how our range splits by fragrance family. About 1,226 of our descriptions use a family word — floral, woody, oriental, chypre, fougère, gourmand, aquatic, aromatic — but almost always as an adjective inside a sentence rather than as a classification, and turning that into a distribution would mean inventing a taxonomy and then pretending we had read it off a field. What can be said is that family words on a listing are written to sell rather than to classify, which is a good reason not to shop by them.

Bottles to try this on

For contrast between the two extremes, compare a close-wearing musk-led composition such as Narciso Rodriguez for Her with a strongly diffusive one such as Le Male Le Parfum. For a long base with a quiet opening, Tom Ford Oud Wood is a useful reference; for the opposite pattern of a bright, short-lived opening, Acqua di Parma Colonia is the traditional example.

Common questions

What is the difference between sillage and projection?

Projection is how far a fragrance reaches from your skin at a given moment. Sillage, from the French word for a ship’s wake, is the trail that remains in the air after you have moved through a space. A fragrance can project strongly at close range and leave little trail, or the reverse.

Can a perfume last a long time but not project?

Yes, and it is common. Longevity comes from low-volatility materials that release slowly; projection needs materials volatile enough to fill the surrounding air and detectable at very low concentrations. Those requirements pull in opposite directions, so a musk-led composition can be detectable for twelve hours and undetectable at arm’s length after one.

Why can other people smell my perfume when I cannot?

Olfactory adaptation. Repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant produces a stimulus-specific loss of sensitivity to it that only recovers once exposure stops. Because you are wearing the fragrance continuously, you adapt while others do not. Reapplying because you cannot smell it is the usual route to overapplication.

Does eau de parfum project more than eau de toilette?

Not reliably. Raising concentration raises everything proportionally, but it cannot add diffusive materials the composition does not contain, and brands frequently reweight the blend between concentrations rather than simply diluting. Within one brand and name the EDP is usually stronger; across brands the comparison means very little.

How do I test how long a perfume lasts on me?

Apply a fixed number of sprays to skin rather than clothing, note the time, and sniff the sprayed spot at set intervals: thirty minutes, two hours, four, six, eight and twelve. Record presence rather than strength. Repeat on a second day before concluding anything, because conditions and your own sensitivity shift.

Why does the same perfume last longer on my friend?

Skin differences show up in the literature. A 2025 study reports that fragrance evaporation profiles depend on both skin properties and the fragrance molecules’ own properties, and that the pattern varies between individuals. Differences in each person’s olfactory sensitivity add a second layer of variation on top.

Does rubbing your wrists ruin a fragrance?

It shortens the opening, but not for the reason usually given. Friction between wrists does not break chemical bonds. It warms the skin, which raises vapour pressure and speeds evaporation, and spreads the liquid across more surface area, which increases the rate at which it leaves. Dab and leave it alone.

Will spraying more make a fragrance project further?

Somewhat, with diminishing returns. More material does mean higher concentration in the air, but detection works on thresholds: once you are comfortably above the threshold of the people around you, extra sprays mostly raise intensity for whoever is closest rather than extending range. A quiet fragrance is rarely fixed by volume.

Why do reviews of the same perfume disagree so much about longevity?

Because three sources of variation stack. Skin properties affect evaporation and differ between people. Olfactory sensitivity differs too: one screening of 764 people found specific anosmia to particular odour categories at rates from 3 to 47 percent. And every reviewer is adapting to the fragrance while measuring it. Disagreement is the expected result.

Does weather change how a fragrance performs?

Yes, through basic physical chemistry. Vapour pressure rises with temperature, so warm skin and warm air push material into the air faster, which tends to increase early projection and shorten duration. Moving air disperses the trail. This is why the same bottle can seem louder in July and quieter in January.

September 14, 2026

Perfume Concentration Chart: Parfum, EDP, EDT, EDC and Oil

Perfume concentration describes how much fragrance compound is dissolved in the alcohol base. Parfum is the strongest, then eau de parfum, then eau de toilette, then eau de cologne. No regulator defines these terms or their percentages. The familiar figures – parfum 20 to 30 percent, EDP 15 to 20 – are industry convention, and each brand sets its own.

That last point changes how you should read every chart you have seen, including the one below.

What does perfume concentration actually measure?

A finished fine fragrance is mostly solvent. The scented part is a single blended material that perfumers call the compound, the concentrate, or the juice: dozens to hundreds of individual aroma materials, a few natural extracts, most of them synthetic. That compound is dissolved in ethanol, usually with some water and a few functional additives such as UV filters.

Concentration is the proportion of that compound in the finished liquid, by weight. An 18 percent eau de parfum is 18 parts compound to 82 parts everything else.

Two consequences follow, and both are routinely missed. First, concentration says nothing about what is in the compound. Two bottles at an identical 18 percent can hold entirely different materials with entirely different volatilities and detection thresholds. It measures quantity, not character or staying power.

Second, the alcohol in a US fine fragrance is denatured. Under 27 CFR Part 21, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau authorises specific specially denatured alcohol formulas — 38-B, 39-B, 39-C and 40 among them — for the use codes “121. Perfumes and perfume tinctures” and “122. Toilet waters and colognes.” The only division US federal alcohol regulation draws here is a two-way split between perfumes and toilet waters, and it attaches no percentage to either.

Do parfum, EDP and EDT have legal definitions?

No. Not in the United States, not in the European Union, and not in any standard published by the industry’s own trade bodies. This is the most important fact in the subject, so here is the evidence rather than the assertion.

What US law requires

Cosmetic labelling in the United States is governed by 21 CFR Part 701 and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. Those rules require a statement of identity, a net quantity of contents declaration, an ingredient declaration in descending order of predominance, and the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer or distributor. Fragrance may be declared generically as “fragrance.” Nothing in Part 701 defines eau de parfum, eau de toilette or cologne, and nothing requires a concentration figure anywhere on the package.

What EU law requires

Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, Article 19(1), lists the required labelling particulars: responsible person, nominal content by weight or volume, date of minimum durability, precautions, batch number, product function, and the ingredient list. Article 19(1)(g) then says that “Perfume and aromatic compositions and their raw materials shall be referred to by the terms ‘parfum’ or ‘aroma’.” The word parfum in an EU ingredient list is the name of the whole fragrance mixture as an ingredient. It is not a concentration class, and the Regulation defines none anywhere.

What the industry’s own guidance says

Cosmetics Europe, the European industry’s trade association, published labelling guidelines that treat these words as vocabulary rather than specification. The guidance notes only that “some terms used on labels are internationally accepted (e.g. ‘eyeliner’, eau de toilette, etc.).” Internationally accepted is not the same as defined.

The International Fragrance Association is more revealing still. IFRA Standards restrict individual materials, not overall concentration: those that impose a quantitative limit “are expressed as a Maximum Acceptable Concentration (MAC) of fragrance ingredients in the finished consumer product, not in the fragrance mixture.” IFRA also sorts products into exposure categories, and in the current 51st Amendment guidance Category 4 is headed “Products related to fine fragrance,” with the exposure driver given as “Fine fragrance (eau de toilette, parfum etc.)” — one category, covering both. The earlier 49th Amendment categorisation was blunter still, listing “Hydroalcoholic and non-hydroalcoholic fine fragrance of all types (Eau de Toilette, Parfum, Cologne, solid perfume, fragrancing cream, aftershaves of all types, etc.)” as a single entry. The body that writes the industry’s safety limits does not treat EDT and parfum as different classes of product.

So where do the percentage charts come from?

From custom, repeated until it hardened. The ranges circulate widely and are attributed to no one.

The closest traceable published figures sit in the safety-assessment literature. Cadby, Troy and Vey’s 2002 paper on consumer exposure to fragrance ingredients, in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, gives typical fragrance levels by product type from COLIPA and RIFM data. It lists two relevant entries: perfume extracts at 20 percent, toilet waters at 8 percent. Two categories, not five.

The engineering literature does not supply the missing table either. The 2021 review “Perfume and Flavor Engineering: A Chemical Engineering Perspective” in Molecules covers composition, evaporation and performance modelling in detail and contains no table of EDT or EDP concentration ranges. Neither does Perfume Engineering: Design, Performance and Classification, by the same group. Those numbers are absent because they are not technical facts.

Perfume concentration chart

Below are the conventional ranges as they are usually quoted, alongside what is actually established. Read the fourth column before the third.

Term on the bottle	Also sold as	Conventionally quoted compound range (convention only — not regulated, not verifiable from the label)	Regulatory status	What the term reliably tells you
Parfum / Extrait de Parfum / Pure Perfume	Extrait, Perfume Extract	15–40%, most often quoted as 20–30% (convention)	Undefined. “Perfumes and perfume tinctures” is a US denatured-alcohol use code with no percentage attached	The brand positions this as its most concentrated version, usually its most expensive per millilitre, and often sold in smaller bottles or with a dab stopper
Eau de Parfum (EDP)	Parfum de Toilette, Eau de Parfum Intense	10–20%, most often quoted as 15–20% (convention)	Undefined in 21 CFR 701, in Regulation 1223/2009, and in IFRA Standards	More compound than the same brand’s EDT of the same name, in almost all cases. Nothing across brands
Eau de Toilette (EDT)	Toilet water	5–15%, most often quoted as 5–15% (convention)	Undefined. “Toilet waters and colognes” is a US denatured-alcohol use code. Cosmetics Europe calls the term “internationally accepted,” not defined	Less compound than the same brand’s EDP of the same name. The published safety-assessment figure for toilet waters is 8%
Eau de Cologne (EDC)	Cologne (European sense), Kölnisch Wasser	2–5% (convention)	Undefined	A light, usually citrus-and-herb style, traditionally sold in large splash bottles. In US retail speech, “cologne” often just means a men’s fragrance at any strength
Eau Fraîche / Eau de Cologne Légère / Eau Vive	Body mist, fragrance mist, splash	1–3% (convention)	Undefined	The lightest thing a brand sells under that name. Often more water in the base
Elixir / Intense / Extrême / Absolu / Le Parfum	Flanker naming of all kinds	No convention exists (marketing term)	Undefined, and not even conventionally ranked	Nothing about concentration. Usually signals a reworked composition, which may or may not be more concentrated
Perfume oil / Attar / Oil-based	Roll-on oil, non-alcoholic perfume	Not comparable — the solvent is a carrier oil or a dilutant, not ethanol	Undefined	That it contains little or no alcohol. Loading varies enormously and is not inferable from the category

Before any chart, see how lopsided the real market is. Across the 3,832 bottles we currently stock, eau de parfum and eau de toilette together account for close to four fifths of everything. Eau de cologne accounts for about 276, parfum or extrait for about 171, oils and attars around 26, and three listings say eau fraîche. Another 286, roughly 7%, carry no concentration word at all. Two rungs carry nearly all the traffic, and a real minority of bottles do not say which rung they are on. These are counts parsed from listing titles, not a concentration field.

What figures can actually be sourced?

A short table, because the honest list is short. Every figure in it comes from Cadby, Troy & Vey (2002) in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, citing COLIPA (1987) and RIFM (1996): exposure-assessment estimates used for safety modelling, not product definitions.

Figure	Value	Status
Typical fragrance level, perfume extracts	20%	Safety-modelling estimate
Typical fragrance level, toilet waters	8%	Safety-modelling estimate
Typical fragrance level, body lotion	0.4%	Included for scale: a fine fragrance carries roughly 20 to 50 times the fragrance load of a scented lotion
Fragrance delivered per unit area, toilet waters and extracts	about 300 µg/cm²	The highest of any product category in that dataset
Concentration range for any named commercial fragrance	Not published	Brands do not disclose compound percentage, and no regulation requires them to

How does concentration relate to longevity and projection?

It contributes to both, and it determines neither.

The usable physical model comes from perfume engineering, where the perceived intensity of a material is its odour value: its concentration in the air divided by its odour detection threshold. Gas-phase concentration depends on how much is in the liquid, its vapour pressure, and how it interacts with everything else. Intensity therefore rises with amount, rises with volatility, and falls with the threshold at which a nose can detect it.

That structure explains why concentration alone is a weak predictor. Raising the compound loading raises every term proportionally, so a more concentrated version of the same compound will, all else equal, smell stronger and last somewhat longer. But detection thresholds differ between materials by orders of magnitude, not percentages: published compilations report vanillin as low as 0.00000016 ppm against ammonia from 0.043 ppm and benzene from 0.47 ppm. A material detectable at a millionth of another’s concentration contributes out of all proportion to its weight.

Property	What it depends on most	How much concentration affects it
Opening strength (impact)	The most volatile materials and their thresholds	Moderate. More compound means a bigger opening, but the opening is dominated by which top materials were chosen
Projection at distance (diffusion)	Volatility combined with very low detection thresholds. Highly diffusive materials are a formulation choice	Moderate. Concentration scales what is there; it does not add diffusive materials that are not there
Longevity on skin (tenacity)	The proportion of low-volatility materials — the base — and how well they hold onto skin	Indirect. A 25% compound that is mostly citrus will fade faster than a 10% compound loaded with musks and woods
How the scent changes over hours (development)	The spread of volatilities within the compound	Little. The same compound at two concentrations follows broadly the same arc
Skin-to-skin variation	Individual skin properties and individual olfactory sensitivity	None. Concentration does not reduce variation between people

The four performance words used inside the industry separate what consumer vocabulary runs together: impact is the immediate sensation, tenacity is persistence near the source, diffusion is how well the scent works at a distance, and volume is effectiveness across both time and distance. Concentration is one input to all four and the controlling input to none. Those are the trade names for what consumers call sillage, projection and longevity.

Why can an EDT of one fragrance outlast an EDP of another?

Because the two variables that matter most are independent of concentration.

The first is composition. Longevity is a property of the least volatile materials in the blend: a compound built on sandalwood, synthetic musks and amber materials keeps producing detectable vapour long after one built on bergamot, lemon and light florals has gone. Published descriptions put top materials at 15 to 30 minutes on skin, heart materials at 3 to 4 hours, base materials beyond 4 hours. The arithmetic, illustrative only: a 10 percent compound that is 40 percent base materials carries 4 percent base material in the bottle, while a 20 percent compound that is 10 percent base materials carries 2 percent. The weaker-sounding bottle has twice the material that determines hour eight.

The second is the version, not the class. When a brand makes an EDP and an EDT of the same name, the two are frequently not one compound diluted differently. Brands reweight the blend — often making the EDT fresher and more citrus-forward, the EDP warmer and more resinous — because simply diluting a warm composition gives a thin, unbalanced result. Once the compounds differ, the concentration ratio tells you very little.

Where does perfume oil fit on the chart?

Awkwardly, which is why most charts handle it badly.

An alcohol-based fragrance releases scent in two phases: the ethanol flashes off in the first minutes, carrying a burst of the more volatile materials with it, then the remaining materials evaporate from the skin at their own rates. An oil-based fragrance has no ethanol and so no burst. The compound sits in a carrier — fractionated coconut oil, jojoba, or a synthetic dilutant — and releases slowly from the start.

The practical consequences are consistent. Oils read quieter at arm’s length, sit closer to the skin, and often stay detectable to the wearer longer, because they are held on the skin rather than lost to the air. Percentages quoted for oils are not comparable to those for sprays: comparing “30 percent oil” to “30 percent extrait” is a category error. Oils suit skin sensitivity, and are the wrong tool if you want a fragrance that carries across a room.

How do you read a bottle when the label will not tell you the percentage?

You cannot extract the number. You can extract most of what it would have told you. Work in this order.

Read the concentration word only as a within-brand ranking. If a house sells both an EDT and an EDP of one name, the EDP almost certainly carries more compound. Across two different houses, the words are not comparable and should not be compared.
Ignore Elixir, Intense, Extrême, Absolu and Le Parfum as concentration signals. These are flanker names. They indicate a different composition, not a measured step up.
Look at the note list for base-heavy material families. Oud, labdanum, benzoin, tonka, vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood, cashmeran, ambroxan and musks are low-volatility, and a list dominated by them predicts long wear better than the concentration word does. Citrus, aldehydes, mint and light green notes predict the opposite. Reading the base tier is the more useful skill.
Check where fragrance sits in the ingredient list. On EU-compliant packaging ingredients run in descending order of weight, with anything under 1 percent in any order. A fine fragrance typically shows alcohol first and parfum second, water after. Whether parfum precedes or follows water is a hint about loading, never a measurement.
Count the individually named fragrance allergens. EU rules require named disclosure of specified allergenic fragrance materials above 0.001 percent in leave-on products. A long allergen list is real disclosure rather than marketing copy, though it is not a concentration reading.
Compare price per millilitre, not price. The step from EDT to EDP usually costs more per millilitre, and whether that is worth it depends on which version you prefer.
Decide on wear, not on the chart. Judge the actual bottle over a full day on your own skin. There is a way to do that without wasting money.

Which concentration myths are wrong, and what do people wrongly conclude?

Myth: EDP is defined as 15 to 20 percent oil

The claim: a fixed percentage band defines each category.
What the evidence shows: no percentage appears in 21 CFR Part 701, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, IFRA Standards or Cosmetics Europe’s labelling guidance. The only traceable published figures are exposure-assessment estimates — 20 percent for extracts, 8 percent for toilet waters — which exist to model skin exposure, not to define a product.
What people wrongly conclude: that an EDP from one brand and an EDP from another carry comparable strength, and that a bottle can be judged before wearing it.

Myth: higher concentration always means longer wear

The claim: concentration ranks longevity.
What the evidence shows: longevity is governed by the low-volatility fraction. Base materials persist beyond 4 hours on skin while top materials are largely gone in 15 to 30 minutes, and a concentration figure does not reveal that split.
What people wrongly conclude: that a disappointing EDP was a fake or a bad batch, when it was a fresh composition doing what fresh compositions do.

Myth: the percentage is printed on the box if you know where to look

The claim: a code or figure somewhere discloses compound loading.
What the evidence shows: US and EU rules require net contents, ingredients, identity, batch marking and responsible-party details. None require or provide compound percentage, and a batch code identifies a production run, not a formula strength.
What people wrongly conclude: that a seller is withholding information the seller does not have.

Myth: Elixir and Intense are formal steps above EDP

The claim: there is an established ladder of EDT, EDP, Intense, Elixir, Extrait.
What the evidence shows: no authority ranks these, and no convention covers them either.
What people wrongly conclude: that paying more for an Elixir buys a measurable increase in concentration. It buys a different product.

Myth: reformulation is always a concentration cut

The claim: when a fragrance smells weaker than it used to, the brand diluted it.
What the evidence shows: material availability changes for regulatory reasons independent of concentration. Butylphenyl methylpropional, long used in lily-of-the-valley and clean-laundry accords, was added to the EU’s prohibited list as entry 1666 of Annex II and has been banned in EU cosmetics since 1 March 2022. Removing a material and rebalancing around it changes performance without changing the concentration word on the box.
What people wrongly conclude: that the concentration label was a lie, rather than that the compound behind it changed.

Myth: alcohol content is filler that cheapens the product

The claim: you are paying for alcohol.
What the evidence shows: ethanol is a functional solvent. It dissolves materials that will not otherwise mix, it delivers the opening burst as it flashes off, and its use in US perfumery is authorised in denatured form under 27 CFR Part 21.
What people wrongly conclude: that oils are strictly superior. They are different, and quieter at distance.

The honest limits of this article

No retailer, reviewer or consumer can verify a fragrance’s compound percentage: it needs analytical work on the finished liquid against a reference, and brands treat the compound as a trade secret. Everything in the conventional chart is therefore convention rather than fact, and the two figures carrying a citation — 20 percent for extracts, 8 percent for toilet waters — are exposure-modelling estimates from the 1980s and 1990s, not measurements of any current product. The note-tier timings are general descriptions from the engineering literature, not guarantees for any bottle: a 2025 study reports that evaporation profiles depend on skin properties as well as on the molecules. Treat concentration as one weak signal among several, and weight your own wear test above it.

Buying by concentration without overpaying for the word

If you already know a fragrance and want it to last longer, buying the EDP of that exact name is reasonable, because within one house the ranking usually holds. If you are buying blind, the concentration word is one of the least informative things on the box and price per millilitre one of the most. Sealed retail, tester and unboxed units of the same fragrance at the same concentration are the same liquid: the packaging changes, the strength does not.

What our own catalogue shows

Here is the price question answered properly, because the obvious answer misleads. Across our whole catalogue the median eau de parfum works out to about $0.88 per ml and the median eau de toilette about $0.59 — a gap of roughly 49%. That figure is near-useless for a buying decision: the two shelves hold different fragrances from different brands at different price levels, so it mostly tells you that expensive brands favour eau de parfum. The like-for-like comparison answers the actual question. Across the 73 fragrances we stock in both concentrations, the eau de parfum costs a median of about 13% more per millilitre than the eau de toilette of the same name. Thirteen percent, not fifty.

Full concentration ladders are rarer than the marketing implies. Only five fragrances in our catalogue are stocked in three or more concentrations under one name: Versace Eros, Armaf Club de Nuit, Dior Homme, Azzaro Most Wanted and Worth Je Reviens. For nearly everything else the choice is one concentration in two or three sizes.

Bottles to try this on

Within-brand laddering is clearest when you can put two bottles side by side: Dior Sauvage Eau de Toilette against Dior Sauvage Eau de Parfum, and, if you can get both in front of you, Bleu de Chanel Eau de Toilette against Bleu de Chanel Parfum. For a light concentration that outperforms its category, Acqua di Parma Colonia is the traditional reference. For an alcohol-free comparison, an oil such as an Ajmal oud oil roll-on behaves differently from any spray here.

Common questions

Is eau de parfum legally required to be stronger than eau de toilette?

No. Neither US cosmetic labelling rules in 21 CFR Part 701 nor EU Regulation 1223/2009 define these terms or set any percentage. Within a single brand the EDP of a given name is almost always more concentrated than the EDT of the same name, because that is how brands position them. Across brands, no comparison is reliable.

What percentage of oil is in eau de parfum?

Nobody outside the brand knows, and the brand does not publish it. Charts quoting 15 to 20 percent are repeating a convention with no regulatory basis. The only traceable published figures for this product class come from safety-exposure literature, which uses 20 percent for perfume extracts and 8 percent for toilet waters and stops there.

Does parfum last longer than eau de parfum?

Usually within the same brand and name, because it typically carries more compound. Not across different fragrances. Longevity is set by how much low-volatility material a blend contains, and a citrus-led extrait can fade faster than a musk-led eau de toilette. Judge the specific bottle, not the category word.

What does Elixir or Intense mean on a perfume bottle?

It means the brand released a variant. There is no convention, let alone a regulation, placing Elixir, Intense, Extreme, Absolu or Le Parfum at a defined concentration. These names usually signal a reworked composition, often warmer or sweeter than the original, which may or may not carry more compound than the standard eau de parfum.

Why does my eau de parfum fade faster than a friend’s eau de toilette?

Two reasons. The compositions differ: yours may be built on volatile citrus and light florals, theirs on musks and woods that keep releasing for hours. And skin differs: a 2025 study reports that evaporation profiles depend on both skin properties and the fragrance molecules themselves, so how quickly materials leave varies between individuals.

Is perfume oil stronger than eau de parfum?

It is not comparable. Oils have no ethanol, so there is no initial burst and less material lost to the air. They usually sit closer to the skin, project less at a distance, and stay detectable to the wearer longer. Percentages quoted for oils and for alcohol sprays measure different things and should not be compared.

Can I tell a perfume’s concentration from the ingredient list?

Only loosely. EU-compliant lists run in descending order of weight, with anything below 1 percent in any order, and fragrance appears as a single ingredient called parfum or fragrance. Seeing parfum listed before water hints at a heavier load. It is a hint, not a measurement, and it cannot be converted to a percentage.

Does eau de cologne mean a men’s fragrance?

Not in the original sense. Eau de cologne describes a light, traditionally citrus-and-herb style sold in large splash bottles, conventionally the weakest of the alcohol-based categories. In American retail speech, cologne drifted into meaning any men’s fragrance regardless of concentration, which is why the same word now carries two meanings.

Should I buy the EDT or the EDP version of a fragrance I like?

Wear both before deciding, because brands often reweight rather than simply dilute: the EDT may be fresher and the EDP warmer, so they are not always the same scent at two volumes. If you prefer the EDP and want longer wear, buy it. If you prefer the EDT, extra concentration of a scent you like less is not an upgrade.

Do stronger concentrations irritate skin more?

More compound on skin means more of every material in it, so a heavier concentration raises exposure. IFRA Standards control this by limiting individual materials as a share of the finished product rather than capping overall concentration, and EU rules require named disclosure of specific fragrance allergens above 0.001 percent in leave-on products. If you react to a fragrance, check that list.

September 14, 2026

Fragrance Notes Explained: Top, Heart and Base

The fragrance pyramid describes volatility, not a recipe. Top notes are the most volatile materials and are largely gone in 15 to 30 minutes; heart notes carry the character for roughly 3 to 4 hours; base notes persist beyond that. Every material is present from the first spray. The pyramid is a convention, not a disclosure.

That last distinction is the useful one. Once you know the pyramid is describing evaporation rates rather than a list of what went into the bottle, a published note list becomes readable — as marketing, as a rough performance forecast, and as a very partial description of a formula nobody publishes.

What does the fragrance pyramid actually describe?

It describes the order in which materials leave your skin.

A fragrance compound is a mixture of aroma materials with different vapour pressures. High vapour pressure means a material evaporates quickly; low vapour pressure means it lingers. Nothing takes turns. Every material in the bottle is on your skin from the moment you spray, and every one of them begins evaporating at once. What changes over the next several hours is the proportion of each material still present and still producing detectable vapour.

In perfume engineering, the perceived intensity of a single material is its odour value: the concentration of that material in the air divided by the concentration at which a nose can just detect it. Both halves matter. A material with a high vapour pressure fills the air fast and then runs out. A material with a very low detection threshold stays perceptible long after most of it has gone.

So the three tiers are not three stages of a performance. They are three speed bands in one continuous process. The engineering literature describes the sequence as a blooming phase, a development phase and a lasting phase, which is a better mental model than a staircase.

How long does each tier last?

The figures below are the ones given in the published technical literature, as general descriptions of material classes on skin. They are not guarantees for any particular bottle, and no regulation or standard defines them.

Tier	Physical property	Published time on skin (general description, not a specification)	Material families typically placed here	What the tier reliably predicts
Top notes	Highest vapour pressure; evaporate fastest	15–30 minutes	Citrus oils, light green materials, aldehydes, some fresh herbs, mint	The first impression, and almost nothing about how the fragrance will smell at hour four
Heart / middle notes	Intermediate vapour pressure	About 3–4 hours	Florals, spices, leather materials, fruity materials	The fragrance’s character as most people will experience it
Base notes	Lowest vapour pressure; evaporate slowest	More than 4 hours; some materials remain on fabric far longer	Musks, amber materials, woods, resins, vanilla-type materials, patchouli	How long the fragrance lasts, and what remains at the end of a working day

A fourth element belongs in this table and is usually left out: the fixative. A fixative is defined in the perfume-engineering literature as a chemical ingredient, usually of low volatility, that changes the rate of evaporation of both the top and the middle notes and improves stability, so the perfume lasts longer. A fixative does not simply sit at the bottom of the pyramid. It slows down the materials above it. This is one reason two fragrances with apparently similar note lists can behave completely differently. The three words people reach for to describe that behavior — sillage, projection and longevity — describe three separate properties, and a note list predicts none of them well.

Where did the three-tier pyramid come from?

From a perfumer’s teaching method, not from a laboratory or a regulator.

The structure is attributed in the technical literature to Jean Carles (1892–1966), a French perfumer at Roure in Grasse who founded the company’s perfumery school. The attribution of the three tiers to him is the load-bearing point and comes from the engineering literature; the biographical detail around it rests on encyclopedic sources. A 2021 review in Molecules states the definition directly: “A perfume, according to Jean Carles, is a liquid mixture of top notes (first impact, fresh), middle notes (main perfume character) and base notes (long-lasting) in solvents.”

Carles worked from the relative volatility of perfumery materials and taught students to build a composition from the base upward, adding the more volatile materials last. That is an excellent way to teach construction to someone who cannot yet hold a hundred materials in their head. It was never intended as a consumer disclosure format.

The pyramid became one because it is a good story. It gives a fragrance a beginning, a middle and an end, it lets marketing copy name attractive things, and it gives a customer standing at a counter something to say. None of that makes it false. It makes it a simplification whose purpose is not accuracy.

Is the note list on the box the formula?

No, and the gap is larger than most people expect.

A modern fine fragrance compound can contain dozens to hundreds of individual materials. A published note list typically names between six and fifteen things. It is not a shortened ingredient list; it is a different kind of object. Note names describe impressions a perfumer intends you to have. Ingredients are materials in a tank.

Three things follow.

Many notes have no corresponding extract

Rose, jasmine, orange blossom, vetiver, patchouli and bergamot all exist as commercial extracts. Lily of the valley, lilac and honeysuckle largely do not; perfumery calls flowers of this kind silent flowers, and those impressions are built from synthetic materials assembled into an accord. The muguet, or lily-of-the-valley, accord is the clearest case. Butylphenyl methylpropional — trade-named Lilial — was described in patent literature as “an excellent perfume ingredient widely valued for its muguet odour note” that “has found wide use in fine perfumery as well as in personal and household care products.” It is a synthetic. There was no lily in it.

Since the 1980s, perfumers have also had headspace analysis: enclosing a living flower in a sealed chamber, capturing the volatiles it emits and identifying them by instrument. The technique exists precisely because a living flower and a picked one do not emit the same mixture, and published comparisons show different volatile profiles for the same species living and cut. Specific compound percentages for that comparison circulate in secondary summaries; no primary measurement could be verified, so none are quoted here. A perfumer can reconstruct the living flower from synthetics regardless. The note list will say “jasmine.” No jasmine need have been harvested.

Note lists survive reformulation; formulas do not

Materials leave the palette for regulatory reasons. Butylphenyl methylpropional was added to the European Union’s list of substances prohibited in cosmetics as entry 1666 of Annex II, applying from 1 March 2022. Any composition that relied on it had to be rebuilt. The bottle can still say lily of the valley, because the note list describes the intended impression and the impression is what the reformulation tries to preserve. It is also part of the reason two people can wear the same bottle and describe two different fragrances.

The ingredient list is the real disclosure, and it is getting longer

On EU-compliant packaging, the whole fragrance mixture appears as a single ingredient named parfum, under Article 19(1)(g) of Regulation 1223/2009. Alongside it, specified fragrance allergens must be named individually once they exceed a threshold — 0.001 percent in leave-on products and 0.01 percent in rinse-off products. Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 expanded that named list from 24 substances to 80, with compliance dates in 2026 and 2028. Those individually named materials are the only part of the compound the packaging actually reveals, and they will soon reveal considerably more than they used to.

What you are looking at	What it is	What it can tell you	What it cannot tell you
The note pyramid on the brand’s page	Marketing copy describing intended impressions	The family and rough direction of the scent; a loose forecast of longevity from the base-note families named	Which materials are in it, in what proportion, or whether any named natural is present at all
“Parfum” or “Fragrance” in the ingredient list	The entire fragrance compound, declared as one ingredient	Roughly where the compound sits in the order of predominance	Anything about composition. This is permitted generic labelling in both the US and the EU
Individually named allergens after “parfum”	Specified materials disclosed above 0.001% in leave-on products	Actual materials genuinely present, above a very low threshold	Proportions, and everything not on the specified list
Concentration term (EDT, EDP, parfum)	An unregulated category word	Within one brand, a rough ranking of compound loading	Any percentage, and any cross-brand comparison. See the concentration chart for what the term does and does not fix.

How do you read a note list critically?

Read the base notes first. They predict what you will be wearing for most of the day. A base of musk, amber materials, woods and resins forecasts persistence. A base named mainly as “white musk” and nothing else forecasts a quiet, close finish.
Treat the top notes as a trailer. Fifteen to thirty minutes of material does not justify a purchase, and disliking the opening is not the same as disliking the fragrance.
Count how many notes are named. Six to twelve is normal. A list of thirty is copywriting. A list of three usually signals a deliberately simple composition or a brand that chose not to publish more.
Check whether the named naturals plausibly exist as extracts. Rose, jasmine, vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood, bergamot and oakmoss do. Lily of the valley, lilac, honeysuckle, sea spray, rain and leather are constructions. Neither fact makes a fragrance better or worse; it tells you the note list is describing effect rather than content.
Look for repeated families across fragrances you already like. Personal patterns in the base and heart are far more predictive than any single note name. Four fragrances you love that all name patchouli is real information.
Read the ingredient list for named allergens. If you have reacted to a fragrance before, this is where actual material names appear. It is the only part of the packaging that discloses composition.
Do not compare note lists across brands as if they were standardised. Two brands can name “amber” for entirely different material sets. There is no controlled vocabulary.
Test before you commit. The pyramid cannot tell you how a fragrance behaves on you. Only wearing it can. There is a method for testing properly, and it takes a day rather than a minute.

Which fragrance-note myths are wrong?

Myth: the notes arrive in sequence, one tier at a time

The claim: you smell the top notes, then they finish and the heart begins, then the base.
What the evidence shows: every material is on the skin from the first second and all of them evaporate simultaneously at different rates. Perceived intensity depends on how much of each material is in the air relative to its detection threshold, which changes continuously.
What people wrongly conclude: that a fragrance which smells “wrong” at minute twenty is broken, when the composition is simply mid-transition.

Myth: the pyramid is a proportional recipe

The claim: the tiers reflect how much of each material is in the bottle.
What the evidence shows: the tiers are volatility bands. A composition can be mostly base material by weight and still present as a bright citrus for the first half hour, because the volatile fraction dominates the early air.
What people wrongly conclude: that a long list of top notes means a “fresh” fragrance overall.

Myth: a named natural means the natural is in the bottle

The claim: “jasmine” in the note list means jasmine absolute.
What the evidence shows: note names describe impressions. Headspace analysis, developed in the 1980s, lets perfumers reconstruct a flower’s scent from synthetics, and for flowers such as lily of the valley there is no viable extract at all — those accords were built from materials like butylphenyl methylpropional, described in patent literature as “widely valued for its muguet odour note.”
What people wrongly conclude: that synthetic materials are a substitution for something that existed. For many notes there was never a natural option.

Myth: the pyramid is an industry standard

The claim: top, heart and base are formally defined categories.
What the evidence shows: the structure is attributed to Jean Carles as a compositional teaching method from the middle of the twentieth century. No regulation and no standards body defines the tiers or assigns materials to them.
What people wrongly conclude: that two brands placing the same material in different tiers means one of them is wrong.

Myth: a fragrance with the same notes will smell the same

The claim: matching note lists means matching scents.
What the evidence shows: a note list of ten names can sit over a compound of two hundred materials, and fixatives alter the evaporation rate of everything above them. Note lists are not a fingerprint and were never intended as one.
What people wrongly conclude: that two fragrances sharing a note list are clones, or that a fragrance can be identified by its notes alone.

Myth: if I cannot smell the base notes, the fragrance has worn off

The claim: losing the scent means it is gone.
What the evidence shows: repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant produces a stimulus-specific decrease in sensitivity to it, which recovers over time once exposure stops. You adapt to what you are wearing faster than other people do.
What people wrongly conclude: that they need to reapply, when others can still smell them clearly. If longevity really is the problem rather than your own nose, the things that genuinely help are mostly about application and storage.

The honest limits of this article

The tier timings of 15 to 30 minutes, 3 to 4 hours and beyond 4 hours are general descriptions of material classes from the published engineering literature, not measurements of any product. Real wear varies with the composition, with how much you applied, with the surface it is on, and with the person: a 2025 study reports that fragrance evaporation profiles depend on both skin properties and the intrinsic molecular properties of the fragrance, so the pattern differs between individuals. Note lists themselves are published by brands and are not verifiable from outside; no retailer can confirm what is in a compound, and this one has not tested, smelled or analysed anything described here. Where this article says a particular note is usually a construction rather than an extract, that reflects the general state of the raw-material palette rather than knowledge of any specific formula. Treat everything in a pyramid as a claim about intent.

What the pyramid is actually good for

It remains a useful shortcut in exactly one direction: reading the base gives you a rough forecast of persistence, and reading the heart gives you the family. That is worth something when you are deciding what to test. It is worth nothing as a substitute for testing.

What our own catalogue shows

One practical note before you go looking for a pyramid: most of the time there will not be one. Across the 3,832 bottles we list, fewer than 2% spell out all three tiers, and about seven in ten never use the word “note” at all. The pyramid is a teaching device that became a marketing device; it is not a standard field a retailer is handed and asked to fill in. Where a listing does publish one, read it as a description of the intended impression. Where it does not, you have lost less than you think.

We would like to be able to tell you which base notes and which top notes turn up most often across what we sell, and we cannot: nothing in a product listing records the position of a material in a composition. That limitation is this article’s point in miniature. Note position is an editorial decision made by whoever wrote the copy, tier by tier and fragrance by fragrance. There is no field to count, because there is no standard to count against.

Bottles to try this on

Fragrances with unusually legible pyramids make good reference points for learning to read one. A composition built on a clear citrus opening over a woody base, such as Acqua di Parma Colonia, demonstrates the top-to-base transition plainly. A heavily base-weighted composition such as Baccarat Rouge 540 shows how little the opening predicts. For a classical floral heart, Chanel No 5 is the standard teaching example, and for a resin-and-wood base, Tom Ford Oud Wood makes the bottom of the pyramid easy to identify.

Common questions

How long do top notes last?

Published technical descriptions put top notes at roughly 15 to 30 minutes on skin, because they are the materials with the highest vapour pressure. That figure is a general description of a material class, not a specification. Actual duration depends on the composition, how much you applied, and the individual wearing it.

What is the difference between heart notes and middle notes?

Nothing. They are two names for the same tier: the materials of intermediate volatility that carry a fragrance’s character once the opening has faded, conventionally described as lasting about 3 to 4 hours on skin. Brands use the two words interchangeably, and no standard prefers one over the other.

Are the notes listed on a perfume the actual ingredients?

No. A note list names impressions the perfumer intended, typically six to fifteen of them, over a compound that may contain hundreds of materials. The only composition disclosed on packaging is the generic ingredient parfum plus any individually named fragrance allergens above 0.001 percent in leave-on products.

Why does my perfume smell different after an hour?

Because the most volatile materials have largely evaporated and the proportion of what remains in the air has changed. Every material was present from the first spray; they simply deplete at different rates. What you smell at hour one is the heart, with the base beginning to dominate from roughly hour four.

Who invented the fragrance pyramid?

The three-tier structure is attributed in the technical literature to Jean Carles, a French perfumer at Roure in Grasse who founded the company’s perfumery school. He worked from the relative volatility of materials and taught composition from the base upward. It was a teaching method, later adopted as marketing copy.

Is there really lily of the valley in a lily-of-the-valley perfume?

Almost never, because no commercially viable extract of the flower exists. The accord is built from synthetics. Butylphenyl methylpropional, one of the best-known of them, was described in patent literature as widely valued for its muguet odour note, and it was banned in EU cosmetics from 1 March 2022, forcing reformulations.

What is a fixative in perfume?

A fixative is defined in the perfume-engineering literature as a chemical ingredient, usually of low volatility, that changes the evaporation rate of the top and middle notes and improves stability so the perfume lasts longer. It does not just sit at the base of the pyramid; it slows down the materials above it.

Can two perfumes with the same notes smell different?

Routinely. A ten-name note list can sit over a compound of hundreds of materials, brands use no controlled vocabulary for note names, and fixatives change how fast everything above them evaporates. Note lists are a description of intent, not a fingerprint, and cannot be used to identify or match a fragrance.

Why can I smell a fragrance on someone else but not on myself?

Olfactory adaptation. Repeated or prolonged exposure to an odorant produces a stimulus-specific decrease in sensitivity that recovers only once exposure stops. Because you are wearing it continuously, you adapt to it while others do not. Reapplying because you cannot smell it usually means applying more than anyone else wants.

Do base notes matter more than top notes?

For most purchasing decisions, yes. Base materials determine what you are wearing for the majority of the day and are the best available forecast of longevity from a published note list. Top notes are largely gone in 15 to 30 minutes, which is a poor basis for buying a bottle you will wear for years.

June 25, 2026

Tag: longevity

Why the Same Perfume Smells Different on Different People

How much of the difference is your nose rather than your skin?

Androstenone: the same molecule as unpleasant, faint, or nothing

Beta-ionone: floral to some people, sour to others

Musks: the material class you cannot escape

The crucial counterweight: not everything is genetic

What does skin actually do to a fragrance?

It supplies a background odor that mixes in

It changes the evaporation rate

Skin pH transforming the composition is the weak claim

Why does a perfume seem to fade on you but not on other people?

Which factors matter, and how much?

Which popular explanations do not hold up?

Do pulse points make perfume last longer?

Does rubbing your wrists destroy the fragrance?

Does skin pH change how a perfume smells?

Do pheromone fragrances work?

Does diet change how your perfume smells?

Troubleshooting what you are actually experiencing

How to test a fragrance on your own skin

The limits of what is known

Related reading

Common questions

Why does perfume smell different on me than on someone else?

Does skin pH really change how perfume smells?

Why can’t I smell my own perfume after a while?

Is it true that perfume lasts longer on oily skin?

Do pulse points make perfume last longer?

Does rubbing your wrists ruin perfume?

Can genetics really change how a perfume smells to you?

Why do musky perfumes smell like nothing to me?

Does what I eat change how my perfume smells?

Do pheromone perfumes work?

Sillage, Projection and Longevity: What the Three Words Mean

What do sillage, projection and longevity actually mean?

Why are they independent of each other?

Why do two people describe the same fragrance completely differently?

How do you measure performance honestly?

How do you describe what you want without jargon?

Which performance myths are wrong?

Myth: sillage and projection are the same thing

Myth: a higher concentration always projects further

Myth: if you cannot smell it, it has worn off

Myth: performance is a fixed property of the bottle

Myth: rubbing your wrists together crushes the molecules

Myth: more sprays produce proportionally more sillage

The honest limits of this article

What to do with all of this when buying

What our own catalogue shows

Bottles to try this on

Common questions

What is the difference between sillage and projection?

Can a perfume last a long time but not project?

Why can other people smell my perfume when I cannot?

Does eau de parfum project more than eau de toilette?

How do I test how long a perfume lasts on me?

Why does the same perfume last longer on my friend?

Does rubbing your wrists ruin a fragrance?

Will spraying more make a fragrance project further?

Why do reviews of the same perfume disagree so much about longevity?

Does weather change how a fragrance performs?

Perfume Concentration Chart: Parfum, EDP, EDT, EDC and Oil

What does perfume concentration actually measure?

Do parfum, EDP and EDT have legal definitions?

What US law requires

What EU law requires

What the industry’s own guidance says

So where do the percentage charts come from?

Perfume concentration chart

What figures can actually be sourced?

How does concentration relate to longevity and projection?

Why can an EDT of one fragrance outlast an EDP of another?

Where does perfume oil fit on the chart?

How do you read a bottle when the label will not tell you the percentage?

Which concentration myths are wrong, and what do people wrongly conclude?

Myth: EDP is defined as 15 to 20 percent oil

Myth: higher concentration always means longer wear

Myth: the percentage is printed on the box if you know where to look

Myth: Elixir and Intense are formal steps above EDP